Metaphorical Fine Print and Potential Job Hazards
by Diary
Summary: A look at Meg and Castiel during his stay at the hospital. Complete.


Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural.

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Ruby, she's decided, had the right idea in taking a dead vessel.

It's so much easier to do things without a near-constantly screaming human in her ears, especially in the beginning.

When she's first hired, after she puts angel wards up around the hospital, hopefully to keep him in and any other angels out, it takes time to negotiate her shifts and get away from the other patients without drawing attention to the fact. At first, the doctors have this crazy idea of curing Castiel, and they try treatments. Part of her thinks it would be easier to just steal him away and find them an underground bunker, but if the brothers had wanted that, their dear, darling mentor left them a perfectly usable one.

They don't want that, and she knows the eldest would quickly figure it out if she took Castiel. For one thing, he calls like clockwork as often as he can. For another, once they did figure it out and tracked her down, she knows her chances of surviving the encounter would be tenuous, at best.

After she gets on the night shift, she gets him to lay down every night and close his eyes despite their shared lack of ever sleeping. Then, once she manages to dissuade the doctors from trying medicines and gets them to agree to her taking over the talking and interactive therapies (the minor in psych she put on her résumé was a freaking good idea), the other work begins.

Wearing gloves, she sews strips of iron into his hospital scrubs. She eats the food delivered to his room and convinces the others he's not suffering from refusing to eat breakfast and lunch. Crazy boy just has a screwy metabolism, that's all, only in nicer, more clinical terms.

In the beginning, he cringes away from her. She gets worried when he stops.

She summons a low-level demon in his room, and when he cringes away, she sighs in relief. He can still see the true face, then, and he knows to be afraid. She kills the demon, and as she's cleaning the blood off her knife, he sits down and tentatively pats her face. It's strange and different, but he doesn't respond to her questions, and she simply puts him into bed and kisses his forehead before leaving to dispose of the rest of the summoning materials.

The morning after, Dean Winchester calls and sounds particularly accusatory. Asking exactly what he thinks she did and going to the hospital (claiming to her co-workers to have forgotten something in her locker), she sends a time-stamped text picture of Castiel. He grumps about it being a bad night and looking to be an even worse day and him not being surprised if this is when she does something or something else goes wrong with his angel.

It's easy to pack the dayroom with salt, and whenever he gets upset over whatever's going on in his head, she takes him there and has him pour a circle around himself. It's occasionally annoying, especially when she has to get one of the humans to get him back to his room, but he quickly learns what to do without prompting.

One night, she's painting her nails, and he looks at her curiously. No sanity-induced recognition, but something a little more perceptive to his surroundings than usual, she sees.

"Want me to do yours, darling," she inquires, reaching over and taking one of his hands.

As she paints his nails (a hot pink shade she's not terribly fond of but gives some variety, and she knows she'd definitely be killed if Dean freaking Winchester ever found out), she finds herself talking.

"See, I know its cliché," she tells him, "but human me had daddy and mommy issues. Lucifer was supposed to be the God that your God never has been. Loving, involved, all that. Turns out, he hated demons maybe more than he did humans. I suppose it's good he was locked back up, but it's hard to let go of the dream, you know? Giving that to myself, giving that to everyone, that was my reason for being more than a screaming human, squirming and mewing as I was on the rack."

After that, she finds herself often painting his nails as she talks and he listens. One night, before she can start doing hers, he reaches over and makes several abortive motions.

"Careful, Clarence," she teases as she starts teaching him how to do her nails, "you'll make me jealous of your little hunter. I don't know if I ever had anyone, or even what and who did it for me. I go both ways, but I've heard, sometimes, a demon's sexuality is majorly different from the human them. With other demons, sex is all about dominance, and I imagine there's a difference between passionate, possibly break the bed sex and that. I've never had sex in a vessel and don't remember if I did when I was human. The kissing's sometimes been nice, though, especially you. I wish I knew what porn you got that from."

It becomes a habit, him painting her nails, and later, toenails, as she talks about anything that happens to be on her mind.

Once, the brothers visit, and the freckles on Dean Winchester's face fascinate Castiel. They don't stay long, and Sam gives both her and him an apologetic look as he hurries after his brother.

Castiel goes to the dayroom and stands in his circle of salt. The room's empty, and so, she sits down near him.

"I know," she says. "Look, I don't know if you remember, but you were God once. You were a lot like how I imagined Lucifer would be, to be honest. It didn't work, but you tried. He doesn't see it like that. He should blame Crowley, though, not you."

"The thing is, there's demon evil, and there's the kind of evil demons are afraid of. Sure, demons like torture, me included. Not to scare you, but I've yet to find a feeling better than sticking a knife in someone and twisting it, causing them to squirm and bleed. Nevertheless, most of us can develop a fondness for others. It may not be the I'd-die-for-you-and-lay-myself-emotionally-bare type, but it's real and can be powerful. Crowley, even as a human, he never held real fondness for anyone, and he sure doesn't now. He wanted to be God, and he would have been worse than yours. You stopped him."

"Your hunter- he doesn't look at it like that, but it's okay. Because he is the type to die and emotionally lay himself bare, though the latter only happens whenever he can get past his daddy and abandonment issues. I don't know how it'll happen, but once you get better, there'll come a day you can count every freckle on his body and touch and kiss them as much as you want. If you ever doubt how far gone he is for you, all you have to do is look at Sam. See, he still wants to kill me for the things I did to his brother, but you did worse than I ever did, and if you had been anyone else, you'd have be dead once you were killable. Or at the very least, once you fixed dear Sammy's brain."

She sits and files her nails, and then, closes her eyes and imagines music in her head, wishing she'd brought her MP3 player.

Eventually, she feels gentle fingers on her face.

"Sorry I didn't choose a vessel with freckles, Clarence," she comments, standing up. "Come on. Let's get you back to your room."

One night, he closes his eyes, and she gets a magazine, her MP3 player, and a container of salt. Sitting down, she props her feet up on the bed, turns the music on, and begins reading.

Then, he sits up and turns. For one long minute, he looks at her with angel eyes, and she's sure she's about to die.

"The flowers are abuzz," he tells her instead of smiting her. "I wanted to give you one, but I was afraid of hurting them. Will you play checkers with me? I suspect Mrs Winters always cheats."

"Right," she says. "Talking- that's good. I think. Castiel, do you know who I am?"

It quickly becomes clear he knows most of what happened pre-insanity, although, he's still not what she imagines the doctors would call sane. In the morning, after she's taught him her cell phone number, made it clear he's not to talk to the humans, and has him busy with yo-yo (apparently, otters really like yo-yos, and she stops listening when he starts to tell her about some prophet who predicted the life of the inventor of yo-yos), she calls the Winchesters. After she's yelled at for not calling as soon as it happened and is given a poem by him (naturally, she tries her best to insult him; unnaturally, she keeps the stupid poem in her pocket), they soon arrive.

She thinks this is near the end. He's more portable, now, and she just needs to stick with them and the twitchy little prophet boy (she has a new appreciation for Castiel's statement of prophets being proof of God's sense of humour) until she can get somewhere out of demon and angel radar.

She thinks this is near the end, but he appears in the car containing his quasi-boyfriend, Sam, and the officially kidnapped prophet, and the first thing he says after booping said prophet's nose is, "Meg, are you hurt?"

It turns out, she realises, then, that like Dean Winchester, she now has someone she'll die and emotionally lay herself bare for. The fact it'll always be unreciprocated doesn't bother her as much as the fact it somehow happened without her realising it was. She thinks she should have had a say.

After all, she just signed up to babysit an insane, fallen angel. She'd gladly sign up to help bring Crowley down. And she might be a demon, understanding all the ways a contract can screw a person over, but the good guys aren't supposed to do that, and she's pretty sure there was nothing in the metaphorical fine print that listed this as one of the potential job hazards.


End file.
